All You Need to Know About the NDTV Ban

NDTV ban apprises a “never done before” action taken by the central government. The NDTV ban was announced publicly on 2nd November ordering the channel to stay off the air for one full day. The ban was to commence from November 9th but has been since put on hold by the I&B Ministry.

Why banned?

Information & Broadcasting Ministry issued an order that prohibits any transmission from the channel of any kind for 24 hours. NDTV India covered a terrorist attack on Pathankot in January and allegedly disclosed some sensitive details regarding the ammunition depot, details of the fighter planes on the location and revealed other “strategically sensitive information” which pose a huge threat to the national security.

What did the law say about NDTV ban?

The exact law that is followed to induce the ban is still ambiguous. However, according to Cable TV regulation act, rule 6(1)(p), live coverage of any anti-terrorist operation is not allowed to be carried out on Cable TV. Live media coverage is restricted to a periodic briefing by the relevant authority.Source: Hindustan Times

What NDTV has to say

In its defence, NDTV channel has claimed that the other news channels and print media have publicized the same information and the channel has been singled out. Also, the channel representatives claim that the ban is unreasonable and unconstitutional.

NDTV Ban: Here’s how twitterites reacted

People came out in full support of Government’s decision on Twitter with most contending that national security has been breached by the content of the news channel’s coverage. However, media has come forward to support the channel. Editors’ Guild and News Broadcasters Association (NBA) have denounced this ban, claiming that it is against the freedom of expression. We decided to analyse the public sentiments on Twitter using our sentiment analysis tool and found that around 50% of tweets were positive, representing a strong support for the Government’s decision.

Following up on sentiment measurement of tweets, we analysed the profile of users who were actively tweeting their opinion on the issue and found that people in the age range of 36 to 54 were most active followed by the age group of 22 to 35 or the youth of the country. The youth of the country made sure to voice their opinion on the issue and a majority of them tweeted in favour of the government.

While analysing the tweets, we thought it would be interesting to segregate the tweets according to different regions of India and analyse their activity. Here are the top most active regions voicing their opinions with their overall sentiment (green is Positive sentiment while red is Negative).

All the top active regions, with the exception of Uttar Pradesh, were found to be supporting the Government’s decision on the ban.

While Twitter users were very vocal about the issue, we decided to analyse the users who were influencing the topic the most. Unsurprisingly, politicians and media personalities were very influential on this issue with sentiment varying depending upon, well no comments !!

Every topic of discussion has its haters and supporters. This one has generated a nationwide reaction. Although the ban has been put on hold, the social media handles are still flooded with the opinions on this matter. And this ban on NDTV has encouraged some other topics of discussion as well.

The text in green correspond to the topics positively spoken for and the text in red corresponds to the topics that have negative responses.

While the controversy goes on, it seems that most of the people on social media have supported Government’s decision on ban sending strong signals to the news channel to draw a line between freedom of expression and national security.

At Karna-AI, a ParallelDots product, we deploy a range of cutting-edge AI techniques to derive meaningful insights from large chunks of unstructured text. This can be of great use to brands, market research companies and consulting agencies of all kinds. If you have any questions or suggestions, we would love to hear from you. our social media handles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Medium.

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